‘It’s tough’: Sales of $111,000 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N falling short of expectations
The most powerful and most expensive Hyundai ever isn’t doing as well for the brand as first hoped.
The groundbreaking $111,000 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N – the South Korean car giant's first dedicated electric performance car – is not meeting the brand’s sales expectations six months after the model launched.
Despite hot anticipation and rave reviews from automotive media, sales of the Hyundai Ioniq 5 N – the first Hyundai with a six-figure price tag – have not matched the company's forecasts.
“It's tough,” Bill Thomas, Hyundai Australia’s general manager of corporate communications, told Drive at the 2025 Hyundai Tucson launch last week.
“It's proven quite difficult. I don't think it's really meeting our expectations at the moment.”
Hyundai representatives wouldn’t speculate on whether the Ioniq 5 N’s $111,000 price has something to do with lacklustre sales.
“Production [allocation] was quite limited for us anyway, so that's not an issue. So, the car’s available for, pretty much, immediate delivery... we'll sell our own allocation from here as I understand it,” said Mr Thomas.
“It's doing okay, it's just not quite as we would've expected. Although most car companies might say to you that they would sell more than they ask.”
The brand has delivered 165 Hyundai Ioniq 5 Ns to date.
The admission comes at a time of mass discounting of electric vehicles (EVs) – both in Australia and around the rest of the world – as manufacturers attempt to move electric car stocks amid cooling demand.
The Peugeot e-2008’s price was slashed by as much as $25,000 in May 2024, followed by the Nissan Leaf dropping $18,000 from its price tag shortly thereafter. Tesla has dropped the price of its Model Y three times in two months, shaving $9500 from the base price in that time.
However, Hyundai says it has no plans to follow its rivals with electric-car price cuts.
“We're running our own race, effectively, in terms of EVs,” said Sam Dabestani, Hyundai Australia’s product planning manager.
“So, we do of course pay attention to what's happening in the market, but our decisions in terms of pricing, in terms of spec strategy, product strategy, it's not led by what we see our competitors doing.
"But really, how we can provide the most compelling product value for our customers that we possibly can."
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